(Wall Street Journal) William McGurn - In a new book, Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States: A Sourcebook, a group of scholars from the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University write that "The American Republic was born to the music of the Hebrew Bible." Their proposition is that at key moments in the national story, Americans have looked to the ancient Israelites to understand themselves, their blessings and their challenges. The evidence, they say, is all around us. The American landscape is dotted with towns named Zion, Canaan, Shiloh, Goshen, Salem and Rehoboth. Americans have long looked to the biblical Israelites for the "political and cultural vocabulary" to explain the American proposition. In the American Revolution against King George III, the men of the 13 colonies saw themselves as modern Israelites escaping a latter-day Pharaoh. These American allusions to the Israelites didn't come from Jews. They came from Protestant Christians.
2019-07-04 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive